The comparison of krill oil extracted through ethanol–hexane method and subcritical method

Using ethanol and hexane mixture with certain ratio can extract two kinds of valuable krill oil from frozen Antarctic krill. Compared with subcritical extraction, it provides a new method for valuable krill oil extraction.

Abstract

This study aimed to develop a safe method EH (ethanol–hexane) to extract two kinds of krill oil (KO) simultaneously and analyze their composition. Meanwhile, subcritical butane and subcritical butane‐dimethyl ether extraction were used to extract KO for analysis comparison. Folch method was used to extract total lipids. When the volume ratio of ethanol to hexane is 4:6, the separation effect of ethanol layer and hexane layer is best. At this condition, the EH method yielded similar amount of lipids (up to 97. 72% of total lipids) with subcritical butane extraction method (97.60%). The recovery rate of ethanol and hexane was 83.6% and 86.86%, respectively. KO in hexane layer and extracted by the subcritical butane method are abundant in astaxanthin (910 and 940 mg/kg respectively), while KO in the ethanol layer had the highest phospholipid (PL) content (47.34%), n−3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) content (45.51%), and the lowest fluorine content (11.17 μg/g), making it a potential candidate in the nutraceutical and antioxidant industry.

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